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White House ignores its Hunter problem
It is hardly vindication of The Post’s flawless reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop that 17 months late, the New York Times has admitted the laptop is real.
It is an indictment of the Times and a betrayal of their readers who were kept in the dark about the true nature of Joe Biden before the 2020 election. But now that we are all on the same page, there are some serious questions the administration needs to answer, which go to America’s national security at a time of international peril.
Question 1
President Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, refused to answer The Post’s White House reporter, Steven Nelson, when he had the rare opportunity to ask her two of those questions last week.
Psaki’s excuse was that Hunter Biden “doesn’t work in the government.”
But she wasn’t being asked about Hunter. She was being asked about her boss, the president.
“How is President Biden navigating conflicts of interest when it comes to sanctioning people who have done business with his family?” asked Nelson.
“What would be his conflicts of interest?” Psaki coolly replied.
Well, just for starters, Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, who paid $3.5 million into a bank account associated with Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer, was not sanctioned along with other oligarchs allied with President Vladimir Putin this month.
Why not? Was it an oversight? A favor?
It’s a serious question that deserves a serious answer.
Baturina wired $3.5 million on Feb. 14, 2014, to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a consortium formed between Rosemont Seneca — the firm co-founded by Hunter, Archer and Chris Heinz — and the Thornton Group.
Baturina’s wires were flagged in “suspicious activity reports” provided by the Treasury Department to a Senate Republican inquiry by the Finance and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees.
Hunter’s lawyer has denied Hunter profited from the transaction, telling CNN: “The claim that he was paid $3.5 million is false.”
So who received the $3.5 million and did they pay tax on it?
Dinner date
Seven weeks after Baturina’s wire transfer, Hunter and Archer flew to Lake Como, Italy, and had a meeting with her at Villa d’Este, a favorite haunt of Russian oligarchs.
A year later, in April 2015, Baturina and her husband, the former corrupt mayor of Moscow and political ally of Putin, Yury Luzhkov, would appear on a guest list Hunter prepared for a dinner at Washington’s Cafe Milano where his father, then VP, would meet with his son’s overseas business partners from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
After The Post published details of that dinner last year, the White House quietly admitted to a Washington Post fact-checker that Biden did attend the dinner, but only briefly.
That’s a pretty important admission, because during the election campaign, Biden repeatedly denied meeting Hunter’s overseas business partners. Specifically, he denied meeting Hunter’s Ukrainian paymaster, Vadym Pozharskyi, who also was invited to the dinner.
moar:
https://nypost.com/2022/03/20/white-house-ignores-its-hunter-problem/